Spring 2007
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MALS 70500
Classical Culture
Mondays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Marie Marianetti
The course will be a survey of selected pieces of ancient literature
and legend that have subsequently influenced Western civilization.
The chosen literary works will be analyzed from an interdisciplinary
perspective, combining literature, history, archaeology, religion,
culture, politics and philosophy. Certain universal issues will be
considered as they are conveyed through the literary genres. The
class will concentrate upon a thorough examination and discussion of
the following primary sources: The Epic of Gilgamesh,
Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Odyssey, Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle (the Theban plays),
Euripides' Bacchae and Iphigeneia in Aulis,
Aristophanes' The Clouds, Plato's Apology and Symposium, and Vergil's Aeneid.
MALS 70800
Transformations of Modernity, 1914-present
Thursdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Rachel M. Brownstein
In this seminar, we will read and discuss modernity and its
fictions, considering aspects of cultural change in the twentieth
century through the lens of the novel. The themes of the course
include war, modernism, memory, and nostalgia. Among the texts are
essays (e.g., James’s “The Art of Fiction,” Lawrence’s “Why the
Novel Matters,” Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Virginia Woolf’s “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” and some chapters from Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory), some poems, and short works by
Joyce, Borges, Baldwin, Alice Munro and Grace Paley. Most of the
reading will be novels: among others, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,
Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Proust’s Swann’s Way,
Coetzee’s Disgrace, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lore
Segal’s Her First American, and Kiran Desai’s The
Inheritance of Loss.
MALS 71500
Critical Issues in International Studies
Thursdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Mark Ungar
This course examines the world's response to human rights abuse
by analyzing the historical development of different rights, the
effectiveness of international and regional protections, the
conflict between rights and other issues such as security and
democratization, the functioning of governmental and
non-governmental organizations, the relationship between human
rights and internal politics, and patterns of violations against
different ethnic, racial, religious, gender and other groups.
MALS 72200
Contemporary Feminist Thought
Wednesdays,
4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits
(Cross-listed
with WSCP 80802)
Professor Susan FarrellContemporary Feminist Thought provides an introduction to themes,
issues and conflicts in contemporary feminist theory. The course pays
particular attention to sexuality, the body, and the engagement with
religious discourses on these issues. Readings and discussion will
also address the conflicts within feminism in debates about the
category of woman, the politics of difference, performances of gender,
the stability of sex, gender, and sexual identities and feminist
engagements with mainstream politics. The course takes an
interdisciplinary and transnational approach to feminist thought and
brings these theories to bear upon literature, film, and scenes of
everyday life.
MALS 73100
American Culture and Values
Thursdays,
6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor
Robert Singer
In this course, we will focus on a
variety of literary and film titles as we explore complex eruptions
and erasures of American identity as it is revealed, or rather
manufactured, in varieties of narrative forms. From the early
captivity narratives, to Emily Dickinson, and up to Kathy Acker, this
course will present perspectives on the complex issue of national
identity. Particular attention will be given to evaluating the manner
in which literature interrelates with other media and how each venue
reflects cultural and historical ideologies. For example, what makes a
text “American”? How does literature from the past comment on the
present? Are literary and film narratives mirrors or x-rays into the
nation’s psyche?
Course requirements include active participation in discussions, one
oral presentation, and three papers (5—7 pages) which critically
interpret the assignments.
MALS 74300
Bioethics, Policies and Cases:
Justice and Medicine
Tuesdays, 5:00-7:00 p.m., 3 credits
Mt. Sinai School of Medicine
(Cross-listed with PHIL 77700)
Professor Rosamond Rhodes
Justice is a major concern in
theoretical ethics and political philosophy, and a huge literature is
devoted to trying to explain what justice entails. In this course our
aim will be to review and critique an array of philosophical views on
justice. In light of that literature, we shall also examine a broad
spectrum of issues in medicine, medical research, and public health
that raise questions about justice. Throughout the seminar we shall
be engaged in two activities: (1) We shall draw on the theoretical
material to inform us about justice in medical contexts that call for
decisions about the distribution of benefits and burdens, and (2) we
shall use clinical dilemmas and health policies as touchstones for the
critique of proffered theories and for the refinement of our
understanding of the concept of justice. By going from theory to
practice and from practice back again to theory we shall advance our
understanding of the theoretical literature as well as the
requirements of justice in medicine and other areas of the social
world.
The primary text for the course will be Medicine and Social
Justice: Essays on the Distribution of Health Care, edited
by Rhodes R, Battin MP, and Silvers (Oxford University Press: New
York, 2002). We shall also read selections from the classic and
contemporary literature on justice by authors from Aristotle to Rawls
and Sen as well as selected articles from the contemporary bioethics
literature.
MALS 77200
History of Cinema II: 1930 to the present
Thursdays, 2:00-6:00 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Joe McElhaney
In the broadest political and social sense, the course begins
with cinema in relation to the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s and ends with
cinema in relation to the age of terrorism. In between these two extremes, the
films being discussed in the class cover a broad spectrum of documentary and
fiction, of the avant-garde and Hollywood, of the cinemas of not only North
America and Europe but also Asia and Africa.
Almost invariably, the films discussed address moments of major social and
political weight: the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism,
World War II and the Holocaust, post-war recovery, Vietnam and the rise of the
counter-culture, the age of Reagan and the emergence of new technologies.
In a stylistic and formal sense, the course begins with a film in which the
cinema first begins to talk and ends with a film in which the cinema attempts to
rediscover the act of speaking itself in an age in which civilized discourse is
threatened with extinction.
Language, in fact, is one of several threads running through the films being
screened as it assumes a significant role in post-war cinema: language
differences, accents, the act of speaking and narrating, and the implications of
these in terms of various modes of storytelling.
Additional topics addressed throughout the semester will include the emergence
of new concepts of sexuality and the body, shifting ideas of realism, the
unreliability of the image to signify, and the relationship between landscape,
culture and history.
Required texts:
Film History by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell
M by Anton Kaes
Sansh Day by Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh
WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Raymond Durgnat
In addition, students are required to purchase a packet of photocopied essays.
Course Requirements: Each student is required to write a long paper,
approximately 15 to 20 pages, touching upon the historical issues raised by the
class. The student may choose to either explore a topic already raised in class
in a more in-depth manner; or they may choose to engage in independent research
on a topic of relevance to the concerns of the class. In either case, the paper
topics must first be approved by me, first verbally and then through a formal
paper proposal, due mid-way through the semester, as indicated in the syllabus.
In addition, students are required to attend all classes and participate in
discussions.
Syllabus available in Certificate Program Office/Room 5109.
FREN 78600
Practicum in Translation
Mondays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Marilyn Hacker
FREN 78200
Literary Translation: Theories and Practice
Thursdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Peter Consenstein